Books/The Entrance for the Children of the Conquerors/Bilingual
While there were many translations of the root text published, I had not seen one I liked. Many seem to have been translated without relying on a good commentary, and seem to have quite a few mistakes. The verses are often also translated much more flowery and poetic, and the verses are often also fuller, then what appears to my mind when I read the Tibetan.
In my view a translation of a root text should be as much as possible a mirror image in the target language of the source language, while avoiding the traps of a literal translation only. Being restricted to 9 syllables per line, and the target audience being having a lot of merit, the verses in a root text often ended up as cryptic, incomplete sentences.
It is the job of the word commentary, such as the commentary by Gyaltsab Je, to fill in the gaps, and it is not the job of the translator to do that in-text. This brings me to the commentary, which is written in a particular scholarly style using repetitions, often with difficult double negatives, and very long sentences, which were seen as a sign of good writing, and works in the Tibetan, but it does not work for the western reader, and so I took some liberties there. I did not translated the commentary literally, like a computer program would do, but tried to keep in mind my target audience and read ability. Therefore I would say it is an accurate but not a literal translation.
My translating style is however to first err on the side of caution and being literal, to avoid mistakes, and then, in repeated editions, edge myself to the middle without loosing the meaning, by improving style, expression and read ability. This process is not yet finalized. But no matter how much good will one may have, it is still a translation of an ancient text, written by a great great scholar, whose target audience was not necessarily the modern reader accustomed to receiving information in 140 characters.
Gyaltsab Je sometimes packs a lot of profound information into a few paragraphs, information that actually will take years to understand, such as the explanations of the ninth chapter, and some explanations are very sophisticated, such as the explanation of the homage. However, the benefit is derived from making the mental effort to understand, and the mind, being clear and knowing, has the ability to understand new things it did not understand before. . Since one can become omniscient, there is nothing one cannot understand over time. And the very difficult points one can always leave to return to later.
One aspect of the commentary that one soon notices is that it is outlined in a very detailed manner, and to help finding one’s way through the text there is a mind map and a leveled outline at the back of each chapter. (Stracke, translator's foreword, 7–8)
